Problem with permalinks after bbpress-update to 2.54

today I have made the update to version 2.54. Now it works no longer correctly with permalinks (instead of the topic-title, now the ID will be used). The settings in WordPress are unchanged: title in the permalink. In wordpress-posts the permalinks works well as always. The problem is only in bbpress.

And one more thing:
Until the update it was always automatically included as the reply-title:
“Reply to: … (post title) …”.

Now, the field for the title in a reply to a post is always empty!
What’s going on? Until yesterday (before the update) everything was ok.
Please, give me your help.

@ Robin: I am very grateful for your kind help and that you have taken so much time! Obviously bbpress now works differently with the reply-titles as until 2.5x. For me this is not really good, not very practical. But I also can not forever stuck at version 2.41. Tonight I will take a look at the simple-press forum.

@ Stephen Edgar: Thanks for your notice. It would be great if you knew a solution that bbpress the reply-titles handles again like up to version 2.41. Enjoy your morning coffee!

You are correct replies no longer have a title, the slug of a reply is now the reply ID.

You would typically only notice this working in the backend by not seeing a reply title in the ‘edit reply’, yet when you look at the list of replies in the backend just like bbPress you will see all the replies have a title, this title is inherited from the topic title.

The key thing here is that when viewing a single reply on the front end it has no context without it’s parent topic. We also encourage the use of the vast majority of bbPress via the front end and not the backend, the backend is really only meant to be used if you cannot do something via the front end, we try to make everything work via both interfaces but due to other issues further upstream in WordPress Core we can’t replicate all the functionality we implement.

As you stated via @JJJ until WordPress 3.7 replies had to have a title, this imposed some limitations on what we could and could not do with replies, further to this change in bbPress there will be even further enhancements coming to bbPress, maybe 2.6, if not 2.7 due to this new found freedom and functionality we have with our replies.

As I continue reading the previous page I knew this was coming 😉

Why do I want this?
1. permalink without reply-title, but only with reply-ID is not good for search engines.

Neither is duplicated content, previously if your topic URL was /topic/topic-title, then your replies would be /reply/topic-title-1, /reply/topic-title-2 etc, similar content but not the same content, now each reply has a unique URL.

2. if I open a reply-post in the admin area, there is no title “reply to: …. (topic title) …” (the title bar is empty) and I do not know to which post this reply refers. This is not good for handling the forum in practice.

This is one of those things I just mentioned above, about working via the frontend vs the backend and until the updates upstream flow from WordPress Core this field will remain empty until we can actually hide it completely. You should be editing replies via the frontend, moderators and users all use the frontend to perform all the tasks required. I’m only a moderator here on bbPress.org and can perform any task bbPress needs just fine, it is the preferred experience as just because you can do something in the backend does not always mean you should.

thank you for this detailed explanation of the background to this new behavior of bbpress.
I’m with my forum not online yet and still experimenting on my test area. That is why I made a lot of things in the backend, because I would like to get to know everything about bbpress before I go online definitely. And so I have noticed it that the reply-titles are missing. Now I will try out your advice in the future everything if possible only to manage in the front-end.